When Seven Mary Three plays tonight in Fairbanks and Saturday at Koot's, the band can check off the last on its states-to-visit list. It only took about 19 years to get here.

"It started to become sort of this running joke," bassist Casey Daniel said over the phone from his home in Orlando, Fla., which he added is "about as far away from Alaska as you can get in the U.S." Alaska fans attending shows in the Lower 48 had been asking the band to play up here for years, and the stars of logistics finally aligned.

When the band got its start in 1992, headlining concerts in all 50 states might not have been on the immediate agenda. Daniel and singer and guitarist Jason Ross both grew up in Orlando, but Ross started an early incarnation of the band while a student at William and Mary in Virginia. The lineup eventually solidified, and two years later a local radio DJ friend of the band's started spinning an early version of the song that would in large part come to define Seven Mary Three.

"Cumbersome" became a regional hit, which in turn attracted record label attention. That song was one of the handful rerecorded for the band's platinum-selling album "American Standard." Appearing at the tail end of grunge, Seven Mary Three took that crunchy, blue collar grit and married it with the big, arena-ready rock that reappeared in the latter half of the '90s, and it proved a winning combination.

Between 1996 and 2001, the group scored four top-10 singles on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio charts, with tracks like "Water's Edge," "Over Your Shoulder" and "Wait." The introspective ballad "Lucky" was no stranger to FM stereos either. But it was "Cumbersome" that proved most inescapable, and the song has remained a staple of rock radio play lists ever since.

As for why that song and not one of the other singles, your guess is as good as Daniel's. He answers the question with an understandable amount of dismissal -- that it isn't possible to pinpoint what it is about a song that elicits people's feelings or responses. He and other band members have been fielding that question for the better part of a decade.

While the group may be less visible today than at the turn of the century, Seven Mary Three never went away. Last month the band released its eighth album, "Blackbooth," a collection of live acoustic versions of old and new songs spanning the group's career. "Cumbersome" was not included. For about the past two years the band also has been posting a free MP3 each month on its website, usually a b-side, live take, cover or demo of some sort.

The members took a break from the band this past winter, probably the longest hiatus in the group's 19-year existence. These Alaska shows find Seven Mary Three getting back in the saddle, and Daniel sounded excited to get that 50th notch.

"It feels more like visiting an exciting place than saying, 'Hey, we haven't hit Wyoming yet,'" he said. "No dis to Wyoming."